Hey,
So, today my account has been silenced and I am very confused about it for the following reasons.
I’ve been playing the game for 8 years now and never encountered this issue. But few months ago I started getting report notifications for my behaviour in communications. My friend also had the same experience in the same span of time.
I know this is the subjective part, but I don’t consider myself toxic at all, especially compared to the average online player. So this gets me wondering what causes these reports.
I would appreciate clearer communications when it comes to what we have got reported for. It’s rather hard to learn from ‘mistakes’ when you don’t know them. It is completely counterproductive and it only encourages confused inactivity (better to be safe then sorry).
When it comes to my behaviour, I’m struggling to find the cause. For example I never initiate. As someone who plays the tank role a lot, I get flamed every other game and I sometimes defend myself, but never take it further. Is that reportable? Who knows? The game doesn’t tell me.
The other possible reason could be that I swear sometimes. Not a lot and nothing more than the usual f-word and s-word but I don’t even use it to insult people. For example:
Because the susspension arrived today, I figured it had to do with a report from yesterday, when I was playing. I really tried to recollect my memories to remember what could have caused the report and I concluded the only thing possible would be when I said in all chat: “my game is really ‘f-ing’ laggy” (because the servers were actually laggy, other people also said it). Couple of days ago, I also said in the beginning of a match: “I ‘f-ing’ hate this map”.
Is this toxic? I really don’t think so, we’re adults here and even if not, there’s a chat filter for the children who are totally not using these words ever. Is this even the reason I got reported for? I don’t know, the game didn’t tell me.
But the real reason I’m writing this isn’t to appael my little 13 day chat ban. It is to communicate my complete dissapointment in the overwatch community management team for all the malicious people they didn’t ban.
Few days ago, I reported one of the worst people I’ve met in an online game. He kept flaming everyone from minute zero, literally writing every 10 seconds something toxic (I swear he made like a 100 comments during the match), spamming the n-word and the f-slur (for gay people), just being an absolute whiny toxic edgelord. He also intentionally jumped off the map a few times but that’s besides the point. I reported him, other people in the match reported him, still no notification about how it lead to anything. “We take this very seriously”
Or also not that long ago, I reported a player who kept flaming me (all kinds of fun words) and he ended it with nice message implying that I should end my life (that was a joke, he didn’t imply it, he said it straight up). I also reported someone who was cheating, with evidence, but I guess that’s a different topic.
These are just the extreme examples, but let’s not forget the endless amount of toxicity in almost every match, from the spamming ‘ez’ at the end of games (lovely tradition btw) to calling everyone dogsh*t on their team. I report a lot of these and so few notifications follow.
I also noticed that a lot of toxic people misspell swear words, I wonder if that really works…
So what’s up with all that? How does it work? Are you only using automated methods or machine learning? Is it enough if x amount of people report someone? To me it really doesn’t seem organic. Or functional.
To close up my manifesto, I’m calling for transparency so we can understand what and what not to do.
Thank you for your patience,
Hovi